Learning to Let Go

Of what, you may ask, are you learning to let go, Ms. Strainedconsciousness?

Because you are grammatically correct, you do not end your sentences with prepositions. Good for you!

I am finally letting go of books.

Or some of them, at any rate.

When I make my big move to Houston at the end of July (eep!) I will only be able to take 2 of my 3 stunning bookcases with me, and that means I must either A) rent a storage unit for my bookcase and its attendant books; or B) temporarily house my bookcase at my parents' home and cull the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

I really don't want to pay for storage, and seeing as I'm clearing a huge drafting table out of my parents' house, my mother and father have graciously offered to allow my bookcase to stay with them, rent free.

Major Tom Shadowmaker is looking forward to having a friend / bookcase with whom / which he can discuss the trauma of being abandoned by yours truly.

In case you have not noticed, dear reader, I am quite obsessive about books and reading. I began reading Shogun - all 1,210 trade paperback pages of it - for the second time on Sunday. I am on page 622, as of dinner-time tonight.

That's about 100 pages per night, give or take.

So going through my books... it's difficult. I have a few stacks on the floor that will definitely be carted to Half-Price Books, and there are a few sitting on an almost empty bookcase because I can not make up my mind.

It's infuriating.

They are books I have only read once. One - The Elegance of the Hedgehog - I am waffling about because it was so heart-wrenching that I do not know if I will be able to read it again. At the same time, it was beautiful, poetic, a masterpiece of writing - and more impressively of translating, as it was originally written in French.

The second book - Suite Francaise - was also disturbing, but beautiful. I'm not sure if I want to get rid of it because... well... I read about World War II a lot. I don't necessarily read about the actual battles, or the politics of them, but I do read a lot about tangential figures of the war, such as Unity Mitford (one of Hitler's close friends and an Englishwoman. Also the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire's sister).

I've read Maus, the graphic novel about WWII wherein the Jews are mice and the Nazis are cats.

And yes, I've read the two-part biography of Hitler available in every Barnes and Noble bookstore, the open possession of which once prompted a less literate friend to ask why I had read it.

I wanted to shake her, to shout: 'Why have you not? Why don't you want to know about the evil that can happen in this world? Why don't you want to understand it so that, maybe, we can help prevent it happening again?'

The books are part of my trying to come to grips with the ease with which a society can turn its back on one segment of the population, demonize them, and attempt their eradication. I don't understand the concept of hate, how people can turn their backs on a whole segment of society.

Back to Suite Francaise, a book written in the midst of the Nazi occupation of France, not published until it was discovered in a suitcase and made public sometime in the last decade (I want to say even the last five years). It tackles the more difficult issues, those not written about very often: the French who allowed their chateau to be turned into a sanitarium for ill children that was then occupied by the Nazis; the chaos of the French as they fled south from Paris, hoping to reach safety; the emotional and social turmoil of a Frenchwoman, her townhouse occupied by Nazi officers, when she falls in love with one of the Nazi officers and is ostracized by her neighbors.

I'm still not sure if Hedgehog will make the cut, because just the thought of it makes me want to cry, but I think I've decided about Suite Francaise: it's coming with me to Houston.

Going from Bad to Worse

Today was aitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks.

My migraines have ramped up in the past two days, and I had to leave the office early today. I did not, however, just climb into bed and pull the pillow over my head (well, not for very long). We have a deadline tomorrow afternoon, consarnit, and I'm not going to be the reason we miss that deadline!

I've figured out that bright light can trigger a new migraine or worsen one I already have. The fact that the office in which I work is brilliantly lit by fluorescent lights at all hours of the day does nothing to help, either. Even if I arrive at work migraine-free, by the time I've been there one hour, I have a migraine.

Blarg.

I was discussing this with my sainted mother a couple of days ago (Sunday?) and she mentioned that one of her students wears special glasses at school because the lights bother him. So, today, while I waited for my Photoshop files to process, and for my SketchUp shadows to render, I researched glasses that are specifically made for migraineurs and migraineuses, such as myself.

As soon as I buy a pair of glasses for the purpose, I will be seeing life through rose-colored glasses. The most successful type of lens has a special coating, developed by the Moran Eye Center in Utah, and they'll coat almost any type of glasses for $35.

That's pretty darned cheap, and they can do a light coating or a very thick coating.

I'll have to buy glasses, though, because I don't want to put it on my prescription glasses.

I'm blind as a bat, so I really should be able to maneuver using echolocation, by now, but I guess I'm slow to evolve. Heh.

It appears that the problem most migraineurs have with photophobia (lit. fear of light but in medical terms just sensitivity to light) is caused by blue-green light, and so, by adding this special rosy pink coating, those wavelengths are cancelled out.

Fascinating, I think.

Or, I could buy ready-made glasses, specifically designed for the fashion-savvy migraineuse. This is what all the chicest migraineuses will be wearing this summer:

I don't know about the pret-a-porter migraine shades, though. I don't want people to think I'm so cool that I can wear sunglasses all day. I'm afraid they'll feel inferior and it will lead to a drop in efficiency.

You might be wondering how it's possible that I'm on the computer at home, since light hurts my eyes so much, right now. Simple answer: Flux.

Not as in "flux capacitor" but as in "a computer program that alters the appearance of your screen to cancel out the bluish light so your body recognizes that it's nighttime." My BIL introduced the program to me, and it's helped with eyestrain (and migraines!) immensely.

Link to get it yourself: http://stereopsis.com/flux/

Super Subtle Me

My super-duper subtle hinting that I would really really like a needlepoint canvas for Valentine's day paid off.

Super subtle.

So I will receive the one featured on this webpage sometime next week (hopefully). Early Valentine's Day gift. Hooray! Then I'll just have to go buy the wools for it, which will, I'm sure, require me to drive all over the place to find a needlepoint store that isn't the one just down the block (where the ladies are snooty and unhelpful).

Mini road trip!

In the meantime, I'm sitting around, waiting for the other wools I ordered to arrive so I don't have idle hands, which is the title of a 1999 movie starring Seth Green and Devon Sawa (remember him? Huh. He didn't look like that in Casper).

Idle Hands is also the name of a jewelry company that makes mini-harmonica necklaces.

WANT

On the upside, I'm almost finished with the fairy-tale I'm writing. The climax of the story has been reached, and now there's the denouement.

And, yes, I spelled denouement without spell check. Sweet.

And yes, interwebz, you're welcome for providing a wealth of links to bring you traffic. I know you don't get enough of it.

Now, I'm going to go back to listening to Toto and playing Tetris.

Super subtle, super exciting life.

My Darling Elizabeth!

For the past few weeks, Radio has been admonishing me not to work too hard. When I reminded him that I was working at home during a one hour office visit on Friday, he shook his head and told me I needed to be resting and getting better. Although I've tried to work as much as I can, it's difficult to sit up in a position amenable to CAD-monkeying for very long, so one hour of working is followed by two of sleeping or, as you shall see, reading.

I went Tuesday to get a new book, chauffeured by my wonderful mother after (yet another) doctor's appointment. We went to Barnes and Noble, which is always frustrating for me, because I feel as though the books I should want to read there have already been read. I've covered almost all the biographies I wish to read that they carry, and their shelves always seem to be loaded with "chick-lit" clad in hot pink covers with terrible scripty fonts used for the titles. If I could bring myself to even touch one in order to read the synopsis on its back, I doubt sincerely if I could buy it, due to the lax level of craft with which I associate them.

I am in no way saying that my own writing is any better than Candace Bushnell's or Plum Sykes', but it is (particularly Plum Sykes - dear God, she can write an article for Vogue but she can't write a novel to save her life. If she's the future of literature, then I will live in the past, thank you).

And in the past, I have dwelt. I saw a decidedly pink book, but it was weighty - 600+ pages - and was part of the poorly copy-edited Barnes and Noble Classics line they publish (I think they get second year English students from Turkmenistan to copy-edit their books). The book was entitle Wives and Daughters and was written by one Elizabeth Gaskell.

I cannot believe it took me so long to become acquainted with Mrs. Gaskell. She was a contemporary of the Bronte sisters and Charles Dickens, and was particular friends with Charlotte Bronte. Her books were serialized before being published as novels, and are, on the whole, much more interesting than I expected.

Wives and Daughters has a light hand to it, without all the superfluous verbiage I found distasteful when reading the Brontes (although I do like their books). I was incredibly pleased reading W&D...

Until I got to the end. And found to my dismay that the book is incomplete. Mrs. Gaskell died before writing the last two or three episodes of the serialization, so there is a brief eulogy at the end of the B&N edition that was written by the original publisher of the serial, laying out her intentions for the end of the book and praising her abilities as a writer.

I decided to read something else by Elizabeth Gaskell, and went to Borders this time (Barnes and Noble had only had the one book by her, and it's not even her most famous work, amazingly enough). Borders had five different stories she'd written, and I bought her most famous, Cranford.

I loved it.

It was written earlier than Wives and Daughters, and her style had not evolved into its state of clear, bright-eyed simplicity at that point, and was rather more like Charlotte Bronte's work, but it was a wonderful comedy of manners, lampooning the pretensions and affectations of small-town England during the 1840s. W&D carried some of this social satire, but mostly dealt with personal foibles, rather than the silliness of society at large (or at small, in this case).

Only imagine how much more delighted I am by the fact that the edition I purchased of Cranford is one of the newly designed and highly coveted Penguin Classics editions, bound in book cloth, and with a cover of Art Nouveau leaves and peapods embossed onto its surface. It was a challenge finding just the right spot for it on my bookshelves, but I triumphed in the face of that adversity. OCDesign strikes again.

Things I Now Know

A few things I've figured out during the course of the week (which has only run its course halfway):

1) The muscle relaxers don't do anything except knock me out for a couple hours so I can get some sleep.

2) If you call your doctor's receptionist in tears, you don't get to speak to the nurse, you get to speak to the doctor.

I also know that I have a CAT scan Thursday morning at 9 am, which means I have to arrive at the hospital at 7:45 am (an ungodly hour) so I can drink some contrast, let it seep its way through my system, and then go lie in a tube while a herd of Siamese roams around sniffing for maladies. I'd rather have lab work done, but that's just because I'm partial to the canines.

My incredibly devoted mother - who has the patience of Job, and a name that is probably mispronounced every bit as often despite its brevity - is driving me to the hospital, just as she drove me to my doctor's appointment this past Friday. And just as she took me to dinner last night and to lunch today.

I do have a bit of relaxation to look forward to at the end of the week, though. A while back, my father was given a gift card to Nordstrom to partake of their spa services (in particular, a massage and pedicure), but he never scheduled his spa day. In fact, he forgot about his spa day, until my mother reminded him. She then gently suggested that, seeing as all of my vacation days are going towards doctor's visits and to my sister's upcoming delivery of a niece for Ms. Strainedconsciousness to spoil rotten, it would be nice to give me a mini-vacation by donating the aforementioned spa day to a worthy cause, namely: myself.

So this Saturday, I will be receiving a one-hour massage, followed by a one-hour facial, and then will stagger back to my apartment to rest, hopefully knowing a bit more about my innards following the feline scans to take place Thursday morning.

Hopefully. The suspense is killing me.